James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil
rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race. In
the era of Trump, what can we learn from his struggle?
“Searing,
provocative, and ultimately hopeful . . . Begin Again
challenges, illuminates, and points us toward if not a more perfect
union then at least a more just one.”—Jon Meacham
We live, according
to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in the after times, when the promise of Black
Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America were challenged
by the election of Donald Trump, a racist president whose victory
represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells
itself about race.
We have been here
before: For James Baldwin, the after times came in the wake of the
civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national
confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar
Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years,
spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that
of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into a more
overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional
and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a
sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in
the face of disillusionment and despair.
In the story of
Baldwin’s crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance
through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises
and white retrenchment. Mixing biography—drawn partially from newly
uncovered interviews—with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis
of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude’s endeavor,
following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in
America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the
tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation
of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new
America.